


Angel

by freedomsparks, iphis17



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: Gen, POV Third Person Omniscient, Sensory Overload, TMS spoilers, dialogue and description, sensory processing disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-11
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-11 12:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/798878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freedomsparks/pseuds/freedomsparks, https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphis17/pseuds/iphis17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is no girl that walks back up those steps, but a woman. Her name is Tanith Low.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Angel

Polite and well-spoken, back straight and eyes wide, the girl comes to _them_ brimming with thoughts, feelings, and memories. She is exactly the kind of child the aged fuss over, and the sort of daughter adults want to raise: sweet, innocent, angelic. 

But no matter how beautiful it might seem, there is nothing holy to a knife in the shadows, and so _they_ take that all away from her.

The girl that was led down those steps by her parents is soon dead at _their_ hands. _They_ cut away at her skin with insults, isolate her from the world and starve her of company, and then _they_ release her, or perhaps not.

It is no girl that walks back up those steps, but a woman. Her name is Tanith Low. 

She is still polite when she needs to be, and well-spoken when she wants. She holds her back straight when she walks about the world, on walls or otherwise. Her eyes, though, have an empty set to them, and in an instant, if the need calls, her manners can vanish and her posture can curl, and she can become one with the shadows of the universe, and even at the best of times, anything of her that might have been an angel's aspect is gone. 

_They_ are the cause of that, of course, like so much else. All the same, though, there is one thing _they_ never could steal. 

A recollection. Flash of color, blue and white and beautiful: a butterfly. The feeling of her own arms reaching out for it, the knowledge that she couldn't quite catch it, the sensation, sudden and humbling, of being groundbound. She thought about it often, in the loneliness of her quarters at night. Thought about London in the background, her parents still in the picture that was her life, about how existence was never really simple even when she was aged four. 

It is the first thought that comes to her mind when she steps out in the open air, free for the first time in years, the breeze sifting through her hair and the sun caressing her face like lovers at last reunited. Her second thought is of her parents: whether they will recognize her, whether she will recognize them. 

Transport has been arranged for her, and her heart breaks a little when she is brought to the wrong house. She remembers a bright red door and a garden that seemed to stretch out into eternity, and yet the door she knocks on is blue and she sees hardly any garden at all. 

The door creaks open, every edge of the noise of wood and metal scraping against her skin, setting her hair standing on end, and the face that peers out is not entirely unlike her own, grey eyes set solidly into a weathered face. She recognizes her mother like landmarks in a book, though, not a memory.

"Who are you?" asks the woman with a voice that cuts straight back to childhood and arguments and Tanith knows that she'll never quite be home again.

"My name is Tanith Low," she says crisply. Her accent is clean and dry, and even though she is less obviously highborn now, she still sounds closer to this woman than she ever did to those children. "What happened to the old house?"

Recognition maps its way onto the woman's face, and Tanith realizes she's not the only one who's forgotten the truth of her own blood. "Of course!" the woman says quickly, stepping back a little before erupting into a torrent of speech. "Have you been through the Surge yet? Of course you have, that's why you're here. What's your chosen discipline? Did you come straight here? We decided to move, we didn't need all that space since you and your brother were gone. Have you any accommodation? I do so wish they'd told us beforehand!"

She snaps her fingers suddenly, as if plucking an errant thought out of the air, and Tanith lets herself smile cautiously, relax her shoulders. She remembers the gesture. 

"I must tell your father you're home at once!" her mother cries, and rushes off into the depths of the house, leaving Tanith to slink her way into the building.

The ceilings are lower than she's become used to, and there is noise, so much noise. She'd noticed it before, heard the roaring engines and the incessant sounds of what nature there was left in the city, heard footfalls and fabric and every sign of life. She hears now the ticking of a clock on a mantelpiece, the groaning of the floor beneath her shoes, the clatter of her parents' rotary telephone, decades out of place. She sees the wooden walls, and her muscles itch to flip sideways.

The world is a big place, she's starting to realize. A big, busy place, where no one cares for anyone else and all there ever is is fuss. She can feel a kind of uncomfortableness welling up in her gut, a need to cover her ears and her eyes and curl up small so that nothing can touch her, a need to stop for a while, since the world isn't going to.

She walks towards the fireplace as if in a trance, and she kneels in front of it. Her hands scrabble back behind her, reaching for anything, _anything_ , to hold on to. She grabs a handful of damask, feels it against her palm, and listens to mice moving under the floorboards.

She's an adult now, she knows that, and she's strong. She was born to it, and raised above it, and there's nothing extant that she believes can truly defeat her, and one day she is going to fight the Gods themselves. All the same, Tanith Low closes her eyes and wills herself not to cry.

She reaches into the part of her mind that keeps track of her balance, of where gravity thinks it is, and she unmoors herself, lets herself become dissociated from her body, and that helps to make everything a little more bearable. She is thinking she has gotten the hang of it, somehow, when her mother walks back into the room and everything breaks down.

She's sprung herself sideways in a violent, practiced movement before she knows what's happening, and her mother in her shock keeps talking like her daughter's not run onto the ceiling and out the door. It's something about her father, Tanith registers. How he'll be home soon.

She can't face him, she resolves as she stands there in the brightness of day and is eroded by the thousand stimuli waiting to catch her. She can't face anyone.

All the same, she has to exist somewhere, and this is the only place she knows, and she supposes if she needed to she could go back into that house and smile and pretend to feel like a human being, but the thing is she doesn't really want to, because the only way she knows how to be is to be a weapon, to think of everything as a mission, and that's not how she wants to treat her family. They are not a contract.

So she walks into the garden, which would have been small for her then and is small for her now, and she sits cross-legged and digs her fingers into the cool of the earth, tugs up a swathe of grass with the strong of her hands. Inspects it, tiny controlled riot of life, weed after weed after weed. They are not welcome here either, she thinks wryly as she smells them, picks them apart with her nails.

There's a kind of a peace here, same if she can still hear everything, and in the absence of walls there's less of an impetus to run. She'll deal with the rest of her family when it comes down to it, deal with learning how to be real in the way that they are real, learning how to be the child who left this place again instead of the killer who has returned. She'll learn life like a lesson.

For now, though, she needs this, so she stares at her handful of nature until something catches at the edge of her vision, and she looks up and laughs to see the butterfly, all blue and white and beautiful, still the most astounding, wonderful thing she has ever known. It's not the same one, she knows, but neither exactly is she, and a symbol's still a symbol no matter where you find it, so she drops her hands down to the ground to brace herself as she tilts her head back, and her face is carved into a smile, and Tanith Low might never be the same again, but there's something of an angel to the aspect of her face.

She watches the butterfly, hanging onto its being like the lifeline it has always been for her. 

This time, she doesn't try to catch it.


End file.
